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Audacious 2.1 Review - Powerful Audio Replacement for XMMS

Audacious is a powerful audio player for Linux which resembles the older XMMS, only using GTK2 toolkit for its interface. It supports XMMS and implicitly Winamp 2.x skins, coming with support for various audio formats, including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) or WMA (Windows Media Audio).

Audacious is a powerful audio player for Linux which resembles the older XMMS, only using GTK2 toolkit for its interface. It supports XMMS and implicitly Winamp 2.x skins, coming with support for various audio formats, including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) or WMA (Windows Media Audio).

Audacious was forked from Beep Media Player, which was also based on XMMS but development was discontinued in 2006. Audacious is currently maintained and the latest version was released in July this year. For a tutorial on installing the latest release in Ubuntu 9.04, check out this tutorial I've put up a while ago.

The version I used for this review is 2.1 as it comes included currently in the Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic repositories. Audacious comes with the typical, simple interface some of you are used from XMMS. It includes a main window with regular play/pause/stop and volume buttons, a 10-band equalizer and the playlist itself.

The playlist can be arranged easily to display various fields, like only the artist, album, song title and duration, but it can also be sorted by title, album, artist, filename, path, date, track number or (the default) playlist entry. Adding a large collection of music to the playlist can take a very long time, but once they're loaded, Audacious will prove very fast.

Aside from skins and equalizer, this player really comes bundled with a lot of features: visualizations, simple tag editor, a playlist manager, but the true power of Audacious is support for plugins. It comes with a huge number of plugins, which include Last.fm song submission, alarm, GNOME shortcuts, global shortcuts, status icon for Pidgin, and not only those. Plugins really turn it into a more useful, powerful experience. Local cover art fetching should not be forgotten either.

Regarding configurability, Audacious is very rich. It allows you to select which output plugin it will use, configure the replay gain, customise its appearance by installing new skins, configure playback, also offering a rich variety of options for the playlist.

Audacious is a wonderful player, and it will fit those who like XMMS or users who switched from Windows and are used to Winamp. Also, it takes a different approach than players who share a common interface like Rhythmbox, Banshee or Exaile.